October 2023
Climate change and other difficult challenges facing global society are prompting a search for new ways of approaching social innovation. At a time when increasingly complex circumstances are rendering accepted wisdom and existing systems of knowledge less relevant, the concept of “natural-born intelligence” put forward by the theoretical biologist Professor Yukio-Pegio Gunji represents a potential key to overcoming a growing rigidity in societal systems and technology. How can this natural-born intelligence be put to work in a society that is in thrall to artificial intelligence? A proponent of the idea that the natural-born intelligence of human beings is the wellspring of innovation, Professor Gunji here discusses this proposition with his former student, Youichi Horry, who has been involved in a wide variety of work at Hitachi, Ltd. In this section, they talk about the relationship between “natural-born intelligence” and innovation and suggest how to work our innate “natural-born intelligence.”
Yukio-Pegio Gunji,Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Intermedia Art and Science, Faculty of Science and Engineering, School of Fundamental Science and Engineering, Waseda University
He obtained a Ph.D. in science from the Graduate School of Science at Tohoku University in 1987. He was appointed a Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Faculty of Science at Kobe University in 1999 and a Professor in the Faculty of Science and Engineering, School of Fundamental Science and Engineering at Waseda University and a Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Science at Kobe University in 2014.
He has published numerous works, including “Groups are Consciousness” (PHP Institute, 2013), “Life, Indomitable” (Seidosha, 2018), “Natural-born Intelligence” (Kodansha, 2019), and “Yattekuru” (Igaku-Shoin, 2020). His most recent publication is “From Whence Comes the Memory of Having Once Lived in that Game World?” (Seidosha, 2022).
While natural-born intelligence refers to the intelligence innate in living organisms, you also noted that many people have come to act like artificial intelligences. What kind of problems do you think this will cause in the future?
Gunji: If you continually repeat a cycle of framing problems like an artificial intelligence and solving them on these terms, you will eventually run up against technological limitations. In societal terms, if a certain group of people continually solves problems based on their own framing and problem definitions, the society will likely become dismissive of anything that lies outside their frame. If that happens, I will no doubt think that I am one of those being dismissed (laughs). I will likely take offence at being ignored.
We talk about how artificial intelligence can do these wonderful things, how it can work in ways that outstrip humans. How would you feel then if someone told you, “An artificial intelligence (AI) robot can appreciate food much better than you can so you don’t need to eat any more”? I would think “You’re kidding” and wonder how best to keep on saying so.
Horry: What Gunji-sensei is saying sounds difficult, but he is dealing with something that is very ordinary, namely the intelligence that humans possess innately. For example, it is not at all easy to get a robot to perform actions that come naturally to animals. You have to analyze the mechanisms at work and construct theories to replicate the same actions using different materials and apparatuses. He is doing much the same thing, only in his case what he is trying to replicate is intelligence. There is much that is yet to be explained about animal intelligence and the workings of nerve cells, and about the problems of awareness and perception. His theories and model of natural-born intelligence are seen as one such solution.
This means it is not about denying artificial intelligence, rather that the practical realization of natural-born intelligence could be of great significance in our society that, as a whole, has gone too far in adopting AI-like ways of thinking. It may well open up possibilities that nobody would have thought of.
You have spoken of how natural-born intelligence routinely creates new things. Are you saying it equates to innovation?
Gunji: Yes, that’s right. One way of looking at it is that, rather than the world continuing as normal most of the time and only occasionally being punctuated by innovation, daily life is in fact all innovation. Rather than being a big deal, innovation is like the experience everyone has had of finding a particular food to be unexpectedly good to eat even when they are eating the same thing as usual. If we were to take a step outside our usual problem-solution framework and look at the world, I expect we might see that innovations are simple to come up with.
Youichi Horry, Ph.D.
Chief Engineer, Corporate Strategy Division, Water & Environment Business Unit, Hitachi, Ltd.
After graduating with a degree in earth sciences from the Graduate School of Science at Kobe University, he joined Hitachi, Ltd. in 1990 at the Central Research Laboratory where he worked on research into computer music and graphics. In 1997, he took up a position as a Visiting Researcher at the Institut National Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) in France, began his research into human interaction in 2000, and established the Hitachi Human Interaction Laboratory (HHIL) in 2003. Since 2010, he has been working on management science for social infrastructure at a number of institutions, including Hitachi’s Advanced Research Laboratory, Central Research Laboratory, and the Matsudo Research Laboratory of Hitachi Plant Technologies, Ltd. He was appointed to his current position in 2022.
He obtained a Ph.D. in engineering from Waseda University in 2018. He was appointed a C4IRJ fellow of the World Economic Forum in 2020 and an expert at WG5 of ISO TC323 (Circular Economy) in 2022.
Given that scientists and engineers are continually seeking to create new things, what do you think such people need to do to become aware of their own natural-born intelligence?
Gunji: Hmm… My laboratory website has a post about the phrase “specially trained rhinoceros beetle.” “Specially,” “trained,” and “rhinoceros beetle.” Look at these words one at a time and it is their dictionary meanings that come to mind. When you put all three together, however, I expect you find it conjures up images that are perhaps sinister, dubious, or amusing, such as some secret organization working night and day to put beetles through a rigorous training regime.
And yet, none of these images appear in the phrase itself. If you ask why they come to mind, it is because putting words in the right order causes a deep gap to open up, into which flows things from outside that you might never have expected. This deep gap is invisible. So, how do we create these invisible gaps? I believe the sensibility it entails equates to literary flair.
This is what poets do. However, they do not expect every reader to respond to their poems in the same way. You only need to open up such a gap for it to draw forth surprising responses, though they will likely be different for different readers. People may well think that those who work in the sciences are the least likely to have this literary flair, this awareness of an invisible gap. However, given that this awareness is in essence the same thing as creativity, it is important to cultivate it.
Horry: The best expression of innovation in my opinion is the “neuen Kombinationen” (new combinations) of Joseph Schumpeter. As with the way you put your words together, innovation results from putting things together in new combinations. This is something else I have learned from you.
Gunji: The cognitive scientist, Margaret A. Boden, divided creativity into three different categories: unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas, the exploration of new areas, and the transformation of conceptual spaces. While Schumpeter’s “new combinations” correspond to the first of these, Boden made the point that there was more to this than just putting existing things alongside one another. Because different arrangements can have completely different meanings, the creativity lies in how you chose to put them together. As in common phrases like “read between the lines,” creativity comes about from successfully bringing out or grasping the value that lies outside the words themselves.
How can we cultivate this sensibility?
Gunji: What I find deeply interesting is that the students of mine who produce interesting papers or good research are those who read a lot of fiction. They are also very familiar with modern literature from outside Japan. As foreign books often expose Japanese readers to different values or experiences, it maybe that this has something to do with it.
Horry: Nevertheless, I expect there is more to it than just reading books. Rather, I imagine it is to do with people’s different attitudes to reading. You spoke earlier about the attitude people have that all you need to do is identify and then solve the problems facing the company or wider society, and that this approach has reached its limits. What is needed to overcome this is the ability to identify combinations that have the power to drag external factors into play.
Gunji: That human beings are adopting AI-like thinking despite their innate natural-born intelligence is, I believe, because we continue to be taught that it is a more logical and superior form of intelligence. We are trained from a young age to hone our abilities to distill things down to their essence, in the sense of taking difficult problems and asking how we can define them in such a way that they can be abstracted and simplified to obtain a solution. Releasing us from this spell will be no easy task.
While we often divide things into the humanities and sciences, in most cases, even the humanities adopt logical AI-like ways of thinking. In broad terms, artists are the only people thinking about how to get away from this. And even then, it is only some artists. As this amounts to only a very small number of people, it is no surprise how difficult it is to get the wider community to appreciate the need for natural-born intelligence and to convey to them the idea that the problems with today’s technology lie in AI-like thinking.
That is why I have high hopes for you. The work you are doing provides a good practical example, and if you can make the case for the importance of external factors and natural-born intelligence from the front line of business where you are striving to achieve social innovation, it may be that things will change.
Horry: Something I particularly want to say is that the great inventions and discoveries associated with the rise of human beings, such as fire or writing or music, could only have come about as the result of natural-born intelligence. When writing, for example, was invented, it seems unlikely that the need for writing was even recognized as a problem.
While research and other forms of work always tend to be framed in terms of problems and solutions, daily life is full of situations where this approach does not apply. My favorite example of natural-born intelligence is, when thinking about the problem of what to have for dinner, instead of wondering whether to have udon noodle or soba, I choose instead to simply go home and go to sleep (laughs). I expect situations like this happen all the time. I believe we can foster innovation by taking this ordinary thinking along with ways of responding to external factors that are based on natural-born intelligence and incorporating them into all sorts of different areas.
This has been a very interesting discussion. Thank you very much.
